Law Commons^™

Were There Adequate State Grounds In Bush V. Gore?, Michael L. Wells

Scholarly Works

Few Supreme Court decisions provoke the immediate and intensely negative verdict that law professors passed on Bush v. Gore. Some of the criticism is deserved. Others have questioned whether the ruling rests on any general principle at all, given the care the Court took to limit its reasoning to the extraordinary circumstances of the Florida presidential election.

It is all too easy to leap from this well-founded critique of the Court's reasoning to the conclusion that the majority – all of whom were appointed by Republican presidents – were bent on installing George W. Bush in the White House by …

A Place At The Table: Bush V. Gore Through The Lens Of Race, Spencer A. Overton

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Although African Americans cast a majority of ballots rejected by counting machines following the 2000 presidential election in Florida, legal academic commentators have not grappled with the significance of race in their discussions of Bush v. Gore. This Essay uses race to expose structural shortcomings of merit-based assumptions about democracy embedded in the U.S. Supreme Court's majority per curiam. The Court prohibited a manual count of imperfectly marked ballots, effectively conditioning membership in political community on individual capacity to produce a machine-readable ballot. Despite the Court's individualized focus, however, merit-based assumptions about democracy interfere primarily not with individual rights, but …

What's So Bad About Bush V. Gore? An Essay On Our Unsettled Election, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There is a chance that Bush v. Gore may begin a process of laying a more attractive and realistic foundation for constitutionalism than the Official Story provides. The very fact that the Court is not politically independent and that it could not settle the matter in a disinterested, apolitical fashion might set us down a path toward a more mature version of constitutional law. The politically tendentious character of the Coon's reasoning demonstrates that our core constitutional commitments are subject to political manipulation. Ironically, public understanding of this malleability makes our politics more, rather than less, inclusive. It does so …